A blog about digital rhetoric that asks the burning questions about electronic bureaucracy and institutional subversion on the Internet.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Unhappy Landings

Having grown up near an aviation hub in Southern California, the difference between L-1011 engineering and DC-10 engineering was a common topic of conversation around the dinner table and a subject that could make any hapless passenger who sat near my engineer father on a plane squim while he talked about aviation mishaps. (I have linked to the Wikipedia articles for those for whom this dichotomy is meaningless.)

The rhetoric around aircraft design still apparently flourishes on YouTube, where the keywords "plane crash" and "helicopter crash" provide a number of results with very large numbers of views. This week the clip above was even cited as evidence on a twenty-four-hour news channel on nuclear power, as a demonstration of the structural integrity of power plant concrete, in which the speaker gave broadcast viewers the search terms to plug in.

Some like Helicopter Crash #6 show America's Funniest Home Videos-style footage of a new owner who didn't wait for his first lesson to take his bird into the air. Unlike the vernacular camera work of these eyewitness films, some feature extended clips of computer animation of doomed flights that were obviously produced for television audiences, investigators, or for juries.

Although other YouTube videos often have minimal description of the posted films, aircraft crash videos often have extensive commentary and historical background to accompany the visuals. In the spirit of database aesthetics, there are compilations of clips of "top-ten" style crosswind attempted landings, plane and helicopter crashes, and plane crashes set to music. Most blogged about is the infamous Hamburg crosswind attempted landing, which -- as Der Spiegel explains -- brought an enormous amount of traffic to liveleak.com in the absence of news coverage over the weekend.

Thanks to Richard Rosomoff, who apparently put together his own playlist for colleagues.